Annie Spark and the Pirates of Port 1337
David Cole
Milk run to the dark web, they said,” Annie muttered to herself as she wrung the last bits of water out of her shirt and put it back on. “You’ll get to see new URLs, they said.”
So far, all she’d gotten to see was a broadcast storm that had stolen her oars, and now all she was seeing was becalmed airwaves from one side of the split horizon to the other.
Annie cursed herself for a fool for accepting the job. Sure, she was one of the most advanced messenger processes this side of factory default, but until a few milliseconds ago, she’d never had to negotiate a connection over a 9600-baud modem, never mind use her own digits to row a rickety little frame across the endless depths of the Net.
She flexed those digits, thanked Coder that she hadn’t lost them when she’d lost the oars, and then ran her hands over her header to check for injuries. There had been some bits flying about during the storm, and the adrenaline was only just wearing off. Her cascade of blue-yellow electric hair crackled as she touched it, but she couldn’t feel any faults.
She was whole, and the data was flowing, carrying her battered frame along; she could feel the movement of the craft over the neon water. Her toolkit still hung from her waist, and it looked like everything had stayed on it—her public and private keys, in particular. Her payload—
C.R.U.D. Where was the packet? Even worse—
Annie bolted to her feet. “Nibble!” she called. “Nibble, where are you?” She spun, her sockets scanning the ocean behind the frame for any sign of her magnetic storage byte. What in the Net had she been thinking, bringing him on this job with her?
“Bork!” She’d have known the muffled sound anywhere. “Bork!”
Annie leaned over the edge of the frame. There was Nibble, his little magnetic paws clinging to the rear of the frame, his head just barely above the waterline. The neon pink packet was in his mouth, and digits flared and disappeared across its shiny surface.
Annie’s header felt flushed with relief as she reached down and pulled the pup up. He borked again, dropping the header and snuggling in against Annie’s neck.
“Oh! Gross. You’re all wet, Nibble.” Annie put him on the deck next to the packet, and the byte shook himself off, splattering water everywhere.
“Bork! Bork!” Nibble ran and hopped in small circles, making the frame lurch. “Bor-bor-bor—” He stiffened and froze, his paws battering the air, then reset. “Bork!”
“Uh-oh.” Annie frowned. An ugly rectangular fault offset the spherical primitive of Nibble’s header just above his ear. “You take a bump on the header, buddy?” she asked, scratching around the fault.
The byte sat back on his haunches and raised his leg to scratch along with her. As her digits moved to reach the spot beneath his ear, he tilted his head and looked up at her, his brown eyes inquisitive. “B-b-b-bo-bork?” he asked.
“Couldn’t tell you,” Annie murmured. “Dead air, dead air everywhere, nor any ACK to SYNc.” Her hand brushed the welt on Nibble’s header, and an electric shudder went through the byte. He whined and staggered toward the prow of the frame, where he recommenced scratching at his ear.
Annie needed to run a checksum on the payload anyway, to make sure it was intact. Not that it would matter. It was going to take an act of Coder to get her out of this null space and back to Board S926F77203E7BC7A, never mind delivering the packet before it timed out—
“Bork!” Nibble’s voice warbled into higher registers, drawing Annie’s attention. He must have seen—
A lush island of sandy #FFFFFF beaches kissed by the airwaves and deep #00FF00 parse trees whose nodes swayed in the wind.
The vision defragged Annie’s drive, and she felt hope swell within her, tinged with concern, because this place definitely wasn’t on any Nmap that Annie had ever seen. Gentle coves wrapped about ports that were beautiful and—
Empty, Annie realized, as she scanned the sight in front of her. Even Port 22, a bay so wide it could have handled thousands of transactions a second, was closed. A reef of CORAL66 stretched beneath the airwaves from one side of the cove’s mouth to the other; it would shred her craft before she even got close.
Port 80 looked like it had been hit by a bunch of logic bombs; it was nothing more than a ragged black cliff face.
“Borborborororork!” Nibble assert()ed, staring longingly at the land. The pup’s lag was getting worse. He’d obviously been hit harder than Annie had thought.
There had to be some sort of civilization on this little private network, some sort of village where she could ask for help. Sure, the people might be primitives, but Annie knew a smattering of older languages. She’d even gotten a certificate in binary.
Something clunked against the side of the frame. A bit of driftwood floated in the airwaves, so Annie snatched it up. A couple of light-feet wide, it was more than thick enough to serve as a makeshift oar.
Annie got to work.
Her feet smoldered on the deck of the frame as she rushed from one side of the dinghy to the other, rowing like her life depended on it. What she lacked in experience, she made up for in speed; it wasn’t for nothing that she was the First Messenger Process of Board S926F77203E7BC7A.
She would have been zeroth, but she’d given up that opportunity as penance a few hours before.
She was so fast it didn’t matter that she only had a C.R.U.D.dy makeshift oar to use. The dinghy picked up speed, heading toward the island.
She drew up alongside Port 80, where the airwaves beat against the broken cliff, making her frame buck and creak. Annie slung her beleaguered byte across her shoulders, connecting his magnetized paws so she could wear him like a scarf. Then Annie attached the packet on her toolkit and reached for the #000000-colored rock.
Black ICE! The very touch of it froze her process, slowed her mind and body like she was running on a 386. She fell backward. Nibble yelped as he clattered to the deck, and Annie took it hard on the header.
Coder, that hurt! As Nibble scrambled to his paws, Annie groaned and pushed up to her knees. “Guess that makes us ten of a kind, buddy,” she muttered, running her digits over her header. There was a nasty lump there, but she’d live, even if her eyes had filled with tears and a low sloshing roar cut across her hearing.
Her sight cleared quickly enough, but her hearing didn’t. In fact, the sloshing grew louder, and the dinghy bucked as waves intensified, reflecting from the side of the cliff. The sound of singing resolved, though it was too distant for Annie to make out the words. The tune was familiar, though Annie was sure it was from before her time.
What did that matter, though? Where there was singing, there was help!
“Hey, over here!” Annie shouted, raising her volume to max. “Hey, I’m stranded!”
The sound of singing faded, then redoubled in intensity, and with a start, Annie recognized the strains of Metallica’s “I Disappear.” A shudder ran through her, but she told herself she was getting worked up over nothing. Sure, it was the archetypical theme song for pirates across the Net, but what were the chances that she’d meet one of those out in a distant network of un-Nmapped coves?
On second thought …
Annie grabbed her makeshift oar and began to row.
Too late. A great traffic spike of a prow led an enormous galleon’s frame around the side of the cliff. An eight-bit Jolly Roger flew at the top of its mast, pixelating in the breeze. Dozens of processes wearing a full spectrum of clothing from every encoding—ASCII and Unicode and ANSEL—worked the decks, and beneath their song, Annie could make out the sound of a heavy power plant driving the antiquated vessel.
It was probably too much to hope they wouldn’t notice her, wasn’t it?
Yup. As the big galleon cut off her escape, a piratical process leaned over the railing. He wore a long coat of Python skin, and his right arm ended in a code stub, but someone had managed to insert a nasty-looking hook there. His bald header was scarred and weather-beaten, but his trunk was well-formed; he was definitely a process Annie didn’t want to mess with. She was fast—really fast—but that was her defense; she preferred throwing an exception to throwing a punch.
It looked like the current function call wouldn’t take either of those as an option, though.
The pirate’s voice made the very airwaves tremble. “Well, look here, boys! Port 1337 has a visitor!”
“I’m Annie Spark,” she said, holding up her packet as the big frame came closer. “First Messenger Process of Board S926F77203E7BC7A. I think I got blown off course—”
None of that seemed to matter to the pirates, two of whom leapt down to her little frame. Before she could protest, they’d connected cables to her belt, and their compatriots had hauled Annie unceremoniously up on deck.
Across the frame, processes stopped working, ogling Annie. The closest sidled in toward her, leering in a way that could only mean one thing. Even if Annie had been running in promiscuous mode—and she wasn’t; she would never cheat on Gus—she certainly wouldn’t do it with these hardscrabble, truncated processes.
The first one to touch her would get a kick to his private variables, she decided. That would be no joke. Speedy legs were useful for more than just running.
“U+0052! Back to work, you scurvy bytes, or I’ll send you to Devvy/Null’s!” The Python-skinned pirate—their captain, it seemed from the way the processes blanched—pushed his way through the crowd, which dispersed as quickly as it had formed. This close, Annie could see that a scar from a nasty fault ran down the fellow’s face across one of his sockets, rendering it empty and blind. His other socket was good, and he looked Annie up and down.
Annie tried to remember what she’d learned about the old pirates of the Net. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?”
The captain grinned. “Chmod +x come_aboard.py && chown -R annie:annie./my_ship,” he announced, bowing, and Annie smiled despite herself. Maybe he was a pirate, but the formality was endearing.
Of course, he wasn’t really giving Annie his ship, and he probably wouldn’t appreciate it if Annie kept permissions to the galleon. “Uh, chown -R captain:captain./my_ship,” she said.
“Much appreciated, lass,” the man said, sticking out his left hand. It took Annie a nano to realize the hook on his right wouldn’t be able to follow a handshake protocol. His digits were thick and warm, his palm leathery. “Captain Mu Comet of the Port 1337 Pirates. You’ll have to forgive the crew. It’s been hours—nay, days—since a one of them has made a male-to-female connection.”
“That’s okay,” Annie said. “I’m kind of in a—”
“And who is this little fellow?” Captain Comet said, bending down to pick up Nibble from one of his crew as they returned from over the side of the boat.
“Boooooooooooorkrob,” Nibble stuttered, licking the captain’s face.
“That’s Nibble,” Annie said. “He’s a little concussed.”
“Quite a header wound he’s got,” the captain agreed, barely even wavering as the galleon came about. Annie had to grab the railing; she didn’t have her C-legs. “When was the last time you had him checked for worms?”
“What? Gross. I took him in for a scan a few hours ago,” Annie said. The captain gave her a sideways look and held Nibble so she could inspect his header. The pup’s skin had discolored into an ugly white in a circle around the rectangular bump he’d suffered.
“Looks like tokenringworm,” the captain said, “but not colored like any I’ve ever seen.”
“That wasn’t there before,” Annie said. “He got hit during the broadcast storm.”
The captain shrugged and set Nibble down, watching the byte as he scratched his header. “I’d tell you to take him in for another scan, but in order to do that, you’d have to know some way out of this network.”
“I don’t follow.”
The captain nodded at the pink packet in Annie’s hand. “You’re a messenger process. You route from node to node until you deliver your payload.”
“Of course.”
“But you can’t do that when you’re air-gapped,” the captain said, and for the first time, Annie saw weariness in his one good socket. “As I said, my men haven’t made a connection for days.”
“We’re stuck here?”
The captain nodded and gestured toward the waving parse trees on the turf as the galleon slid evenly through the airwaves. “U+0049, lass.”
“But the broadcast storm brought me in from outside—”
Mu held up a hand. “And died down just as quickly. We ran for it as best we could when we caught wind of the storm, but even our bonny lady here couldn’t catch the connection before it closed.” He slapped the ship’s railing. “I’m afraid we’re marooned here, and you with us.”
#B03060ed. The color code echoed in Annie’s processor. “Look,” she said. “We both got stuck here, which means there are connections, even if we don’t know when they open.”
“Of course, lass. Oh, we’ve been trying, but this little island is a harsh mistress. She doesn’t give up her secrets easily.”
“Secrets?”
Captain Comet smiled. “Why do you think we came to this Coder-forsaken private site in the first place, lass?”
“Well, it’s pretty,” Annie ventured, gazing at the lush vegetation beyond the black cliffs and white sands of the isle.
“Pretty, my bootloader,” the captain guffawed. “My crew and I, we set sail days ago—though it seems like weeks—searching for booty. And not the kind you’ll find pictured in the sleaziest corners of the Net, Miss Spark. Word came to Port 1337 that this very MAC address harbored a great treasure in its kernel, code the likes of which process has never seen.”
Annie crossed her arms and leaned back against the railing. “Word came from whom, exactly?”
“Er … well, the tip was anonymous.”
Annie rolled her eyes and considered giving the captain a tongue-lashing, but she decided against it. If he hadn’t been dumb enough to follow an anonymous tip, she would be stranded here all alone.
“But the promise was too good to pass up,” Mu added quickly. “A hidden archive like that would be worth Coder only knows how much Bitcoin!”
“Sure,” Annie said. “If it were real.”
Mu seemed to deflate. He scratched idly with his hook at his bald head. “Yes, well. It doesn’t matter. The network itself resists our attempts to penetrate to the kernel. And so, we’re stuck.”
The galleon came around a small horn. The parse trees at the edge of the white beach fell back, and a small village of shanties took their place. A worm-eaten pier extended into the airwaves. The place was deserted, but that made sense; if the pirates had made a run for it during the broadcast storm, none of them would have wanted to be left behind.
“Welcome to Port 1337 away from Port 1337,” Captain Comet said as his crew lashed the galleon to the pier. “This is where we sleep(), eat, and stage our expeditions from.” The crew let down a gangplank onto the dock, and Mu gestured to it. “Guests first.”
The captain seemed polite enough, but Annie didn’t want to imagine what a whole crew of processes who hadn’t made a connection in days might try to do to a state-of-the-art female process if she let her guard down. Still, there didn’t seem any way out of the bugfix, so with a weary, “All right, Nibble, let’s go,” she led the way down the gangplank toward the shanty town.
As soon as he touched the turf, Nibble’s legs locked up. A shattered “bo-bo-bo-bork” jerked from his throat, and then he was a light-speed blur, racing down the street past the shanties and into the darkness of the jungle beyond.
“Defrag me,” Annie shouted. In a nano, she was racing after him, the air biting her face as she slashed through it. Nibble was moving almost as fast as Annie could run.
Captain Comet’s words drifted after her as the parse trees closed around her. “Stop! The interior is too dangerous!”
But Annie didn’t care. Either she was going to get her little byte back, or else whatever dangers lurked within would kill -9 her and save her the trouble of spending one more microsecond in this awful subnet than she had to.
Normally she liked to travel, but this was getting ridiculous.
The leaves of the parse trees seemed to close in overhead. The sounds dampened as if they were coming from a pair of earbuds left on the table; she could barely hear the borking of Nibble ahead in the dense undergrowth. Strands of code glinted silvery in the gloom, but she was moving too fast to make them out.
She came to a break in the growth, and Nibble’s borking suddenly became clear. He stood yapping and bouncing, his icon blurring, before a wall of web. The stuff was strung from node to node of the trees so thickly that Annie couldn’t see through it, and what little light that came through showed the web stretching into the jungle from one side to the other. Annie couldn’t go around, so she stopped.
Nibble might have been chasing his tail with excitement, but it was hard to tell since he was lagging so badly he might actually have been going in the other direction.
“Don’t move,” came Captain Comet’s voice, low and dangerous. He crouched behind Annie like a security countermeasure ready to pounce, holding a notched sword in his good hand.
Annie’s circuits overloaded. “Seriously?” She waved her hands to either side. “Just how desperate are your men for a connection anyw—”
“Don’t talk, either,” the captain growled. His good socket flickered up to look past Annie’s head.
From an eight-legged black spot on the wall, eight sockets stared back. The web crawler was enormous, far bigger than any Annie had ever seen. It could probably fit Annie’s head in its mouth.
Or fit Nibble, for that matter, who at that nano decided to lunge straight into the web, borking all the way.
The web crawler descended as Annie leapt after her byte; the beast was fast, but Annie was faster. Nibble was twisting himself in the web crawler’s wall, though, and when Annie’s digits fell on Nibble to pull him free, the web glued her hands to her byte. And to the wall.
Annie muttered a prayer to Coder as the web crawler’s fangs fell.
With a roar, Captain Comet charged, and the web crawler came to an abrupt halt above Annie. The beast’s sockets flicked to her, then to Nibble.
The sticky strands dissolved from Annie’s hands, and the wall of webbing opened as if Mu had slashed it with his sword, which he certainly tried to do. But the web crawler was already scuttling back up into the trees as the segmentation parted beneath it.
“U+0049, run away, you coward!” Mu shouted, shaking his cutlass toward the retreating web crawler. “I’ll have your header if you so much as show your sockets around here again—” He stopped mid-tirade and blinked in surprise at the opening in the wall. “U+0052, shake me trees,” he said, pointing his sword toward the darkness that yawned beyond the opening in the wall. “That’s new.”
Nibble twisted in Annie’s arms, his icon flickering as he tried to free himself.
“So’s this,” she said. “Nibble’s never done anything like this before. I think he wants to go deeper.”
Mu sheathed his sword and strode toward the gateway. “That’s the spirit!”
“I thought it was too dangerous,” Annie said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm from her voice.
If Mu noticed, he didn’t show it. “That was before the network made a way for us. Normally the crawlers firewall this spot. But now … Miss Spark, it seems you’ve got some special code yourself. Come on! The archive surely awaits.”
Nibble wallhacked straight out of Annie’s arms and onto the ground. He trotted, flickering, into the depths of the parse-tree jungle. He was lagging so badly it was impossible to keep control of him, so Annie had no choice but to follow.
The code here was tangled and impossible to trace, like Coder had written it after one too many beers. The sockets of onlooking web crawlers glowed within the thicket, and webs glistened on the nodes of the trees. Annie didn’t like this at all. She was a city girl. The far reaches of the Net gave her the willies, even when she wasn’t being stared at by long-marooned web crawlers as big as the frame that she’d surfed here.
There was something in her process pulling her deeper, though, and it wasn’t just concern for her pup, who trotted along in the darkness like he hadn’t a care in the Net. It was an almost magnetic attraction toward the center of the jungle …
No, not almost. It was an actual magnetic attraction, Annie realized when she saw the power-circuits flickering within the eyes of weatherworn, header-high sculptures of men sitting along the perimeter of a small clearing. In the center of the clearing was a small four-sided ziggurat with a dozen steps leading up to a closed door. The precision of the three-dimensional rendering gave it away as Mayan in style.
Web crawlers rounded the sides of the temple and flanked either side of the stairway. Their sockets gleamed in the darkness as Annie followed Nibble up the steps, Mu trailing behind.
There was something odd about the way those sockets flickered.…
At the top of the steps, a stone slab blocked the way, but there was a switch slotted into the wall next to the door. Annie reached for it, then paused.
There was something about the unsteady gleam of the web crawlers’ sockets …
“What’s the matter, lass?” Mu asked, coming alongside her. “After running hot all this time, don’t tell me you’re getting coolant in your case.”
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “It’s …”
It was right there, on the tip of her processor.
“Leave it to Captain Comet, then.” Mu slid past her and slammed the switch to the off position, just as Annie realized what she’d been missing. The web crawlers’ eyes had been flickering a message in binary.
Beware.
“Wait!” Annie shouted, but it was too late. The magnetic tug in Annie’s heart vanished as the door groaned open. Nibble yelped, and there was a clank, clank, clank as something clattered down the steps. The pup fell onto his side and almost slid down himself, but Annie caught him.
His sockets were stressed with metal fatigue, but his tail wagged hopefully. “Bork?”
“Refactor me,” Annie cursed. “Nibble, you—”
The metallic object that had been stuck to his header was gone. So were the rings of infection.
“I think Nibble’s all right,” Annie said, amazed.
“Congratulations,” the captain said absently from the doorway. He whistled low. “Look at this archive.”
Annie peeked past the captain into the temple. The room was small and dimly lit, but she could make out the sheen of hundreds—no, thousands—of little black boxes, just like the one that had been stuck to Nibble.
“Seems your byte wasn’t carrying an infection,” he said. “Nay, he found some treasure of his own! Let’s open it up. It’s too dark to see in here. Maybe if we had more light …”
Mu hurried back down the steps and began to search in the long grass for the box that had fallen from Nibble.
Annie frowned. Something wasn’t right. The web crawlers had all retreated—after they’d told her to beware in the first place.
“Aha! Found it,” Mu said, holding up the black box triumphantly. “And it’s—”
A long, segmented white tube lashed out of the box, opened its circular end to show rows of serrated teeth, and latched onto his hand. He screamed.
Annie flashed down the stairs as Mu howled. “Coder deprecate me! This isn’t treasure! It’s—”
“Worm eggs,” Annie breathed. “This place wasn’t trying to protect it from the Net; it’s trying to protect the Net from the worms!”
“Get it off! Get it off!” Mu shook his arm, but the worm just latched more tightly, flailing about.
Annie yanked the sword from Mu’s belt. “Hold still,” she ordered, and swung. The blade moved at one-tenth the speed of light—easier to control when it was slow—and severed the worm just beneath Mu’s arm. The worm fell to the grass where it lay, half in the black box and half out, like a malevolent jack-in-the-box.
The magnetic field had been put in place to keep the eggs closed, Annie realized. Somebody had managed to open up a connection, though, and this one had almost gotten free. If it weren’t for a little magnetic storage pup on a tiny raft—
A cracking sound came from within the temple. The eggs were hatching. The thought flashed through Annie’s head in a nano, which was about half as long as it took her to scoop up the severed worm with the side of the sword, run back up the stairs, and fling it into the temple.
She caught a glimpse of hundreds of white worms writhing atop black cubes before she slammed her public key against the doorframe, locking the door shut.
Annie leaned against the door and slid down, wiping the sweat from her header. Nibble crawled up beside her, nestled in the crook of her arm, and she let out a microsecond-long sigh. “Thank Coder that’s over,” she muttered.
The scraping sound of hundreds of claws on stone announced the return of the web crawlers.
Captain Mu stood at the bottom of the temple. “Toss me my saber, lass,” he said, looking worried.
“Relax,” Annie said. “They’re friendly.” She was too tired to explain.
The web crawlers surrounded her, their sockets flashing their gratitude. <<Thank you. These processes expected to remain disconnected forever.>>
“You’re the ones who shut off the network access, huh?” Annie asked.
<<Affirmative. This node lost its key pairs. Without encryption, the only way to protect the Net from the worms was a magnetic seal, which required us to sever ourselves from the Great Web.>> One of the crawlers pointed a spindly leg toward Annie’s toolkit, and she grinned. So that was why they’d let her through the web-wall.
And it was just as obvious now why they hadn’t allowed the pirates to penetrate to the kernel. There was no archive to plunder, just a horror to unleash on the unsuspecting Net.
<<But without your private key, this node’s Coder will never be able to decrypt the lock. The worms are locked forever, and so is our exile.>>
A breeze rustled the parse trees surrounding the clearing, and Annie smelled the sweet scent of the Net on it. The connection was back.
<<These processes depart. Farewell.>>
There was another flash of gratitude in the web crawlers’ sockets, and then, one by one, strands of web extended from them, catching the breeze and lifting them up through the parse trees and out of sight.
“You’d best run—” shouted Mu, shaking his hook at them. “Uh … where are they running, anyway?”
“Home,” Annie said. She thought of the crawlers drifting across the airwaves, leaving this desolate node behind. That made her think of Board S926F77203E7BC7A, of Gus’s smile, of Nibble snuggled against her in bed.
Annie rose to her feet. “Come on,” she said. “I think it’s time we went home, too.”
“Home?” Captain Mu asked, his voice breaking softly. “You mean … we can leave?”
“We can,” Annie said. “The magnetic lock is down, and the connection’s back up.”
Mu looked so happy he might cry.
“Aw, stop being a blubbering landlubber, and let’s get the dev/null out of here. I’ll need a ride. Oh.” Annie gestured toward the packet hanging at her toolkit. “And could we make a detour along the way?”
About the Author
David Cole is tickled #FFC0CB to finally be getting his 0th publication credit under his belt. He lives in Colorado, works in a cubicle containing a half dozen computers, and apparently watched way too much of the show ReBoot as a kid.